[clue-tech] Forcing use of SOCKS proxy at OS level?

[Peter Kuykendall]

I'm wondering if it is possible to have all of my Linux connections to 
the Internet be forced by the OS to go over the SOCKS proxy.  One 
possible way may be to have the SOCKS proxy show up as a sort of virtual 
NIC, and making the real NIC be unavailable or hidden. (?)

I want to do this for several reasons:

 - I often need to connect via my employer's network.  It's fine as long 
as I run everything through an SSH tunnel to my server at home; all 
traffic is encrypted, and the employer is OK with this (!).  But this 
gets circumvented by apps that can't or won't use the proxy.  Ethereal 
reveals many offenders who are spraying out traffic in the clear.  I 
don't want the employers logs to have all of my IP addresses in there.

 - Some applications just can't be configured to use a proxy at all.

 - Some applications (e.g. VLC) won't use the configured proxy, at least 
not in all cases.

 - Some applications (e.g. HOTWAYD, HOTSMTPD) will silently ignore 
malformed proxy configuration strings, defaulting to direct Internet
connection.

I realize that DNS requests, being UDP, go out in the clear without 
explicitly tunneling them separately.  That's another project (maybe); 
for now I have Firefox configured to tunnel the DNS via the proxy, and I 
don't worry about the others.

I have searched around a bit using Google, but I don't see an obvious 
way to force this SOCKS connectivity model.  Is there a way to do this?

Thanks for any input.

-- 

Peter Kuykendall
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